I usually make a habit of posting these off topic subjects elsewhere but I'm hoping that this might create some discussions amongst the "ultra high end" faithful.
First, here's the link to the BBC article;
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8529232.stmAside from the amazing technology that it's taken to make this possible, after a little thought, several things occurred to me.
Science has always tried to make sense of what is observed in the natural world. The visual world has always been our first line of inquiry which is understandable since it's the primary way we use to interact with the outside world.
Sound is still somewhat mysterious to the man on the street but it
is important. Imagine trying to figure out how a bat navigates in the dark if the sounds it was emitting were ultrasonic? I'm really hoping that once this becomes a proper research tool, there will be head slaps coming from many corners of research (particularly in viral/bacterial understanding).
Ok,.. so how could this all be related to high end audio. Well, I can't say that I believe that our obsessive pursuit of the "straight wire with gain" has anything in the reduction of noise or electrical artifacts over medical or military applications but our measuring instruments, our ears and brain, have been reducing some as of yet, unnamed and as far as I know, and unmeasured distortion.
While high end audio has taken a good number of wrong turns in it's development, I feel that it's slowly but surely moved forward. There's going to be the urge to make the "million monkeys on typewriters" analogy but I'd like to think it's been a little more evolutionary in nature. As products come and go, the ones left standing pull the direction of future developments in the correct direction (continuously reducing these unnamed distortions).
For instance, the great improvements in perception of soundstage indicates (to me at least) the passing of the tiny signals that our brains process as spacial cues.
So, how does this relate to the article?
At least for the near future, I think that human ears will still take a major role in the analysis of the sounds that this research will yield. And for human ears to hear it, amplifiers, cables and transducers of the highest quality will be needed. And while single crystal 10+OFC might be a little over the top for listening to The Four Tops, maybe this refined a conductor could help to detect a fatal flaw in the reproduction of a virus?
